ALBANY – The Pataki administration awarded a $1.1 million no-bid contract to a Republican-connected law firm tied to the governor’s former chief counsel, The Post has learned.

Two of the name partners in the firm, Ruberti, Girvin & Ferlazzo of Albany, are friends and college associates of Michael Finnegan, a longtime Pataki political intimate who served as the governor’s counsel when the three-year contract was awarded in September 1996, records and interviews show.

After the contract was awarded, the firm hired Finnegan’s sister, Maureen P. Finnegan.

State payroll records show Maureen Finnegan, who had worked as an aide to Pataki when he was a state senator, quit her job as an assistant attorney general in January 1997 before going to work for the law firm.

She had been earning $38,749 as an assistant attorney general. Her pay at the law firm was not available.

“There’s a kind of a whole family here that goes back a long way,” partner E. Michael Ruberti told The Post when asked about his law firm’s ties with the Pataki administration.

Ruberti said he taught Finnegan and fellow law-firm partner, James E. Girvin, while both were students in the late 1970s at Siena College in Loudonville, an Albany suburb.

Administration insiders said Finnegan, as the governor’s chief counsel, would have been in a position to approve or kill the legal contract.

Repeated attempts to reach Finnegan – who resigned as Pataki’s counsel in October 1997 to become a managing director at J.P. Morgan, the investment bank – and his 29-year-old sister were unsuccessful.

Ruberti, Girvin & Ferlazzo’s legal contract – to help the state Tax Department recover taxes owed by bankrupt corporations – has drawn harsh scrutiny from Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, a Democrat. He has decided not to renew the contract when it expires on Sept. 9, sources told The Post.

“This is a contract that was given to the political allies and the relatives of people in the executive office,” said a Spitzer spokesman, referring to Pataki’s office.

“Did you notice in Martindale-Hubbell [lawyers’ directory] that there are not many bankruptcy experts at the firm?” said the spokesman.

The 1999 edition of Martindale-Hubbell, the authoritative annual listing of the nation’s law firms and their specialties, shows 18 lawyers at the Ruberti firm, only one with bankruptcy law as a specialty.

And that lawyer, Lawrence Cooper, is no longer with the firm.

The Spitzer spokesman claimed that members of the Ruberti firm had been “large contributors” to Pataki and the Republican Party.

The firm has contributed to the Republican State Committee and, Ruberti said, recently sponsored a fund-raising event for Republican Lt. Gov. Mary Donohue.

Former state Tax Commissioner Michael Urbach, who was recently promoted by Pataki to a $180,000-a-year job at the state Power Authority, insisted in an interview that he was responsible for hiring the Ruberti firm.

Urbach, a certified public account, said he came to know the firm while working in Albany and was initially contacted by Cooper.

“I was very disappointed with the collections efforts that had been going on with the attorney general’s office, and I wanted to move them along because of all the money that was owed to the state,” said Urbach.

“Cooper came to me with the concept of doing some of the outside collection work. I had also known Jay Girvin for several years when he was at another law firm and had good experiences with him,” continued Urbach.

But Ruberti, a one-time Republican candidate for Albany mayor, said it wouldn’t be “easy” to explain how his firm wound up with the state contract. “I can’t tell you why we had it because I don’t think there’s an easy answer to that,” he said.

Pataki spokesman Michael McKeon called the statements by Spitzer’s office “ridiculous,” insisting, “It’s nothing more than an attempt by the attorney general to cover up his own failure to act in this area.

“He has no clue how these law firms were selected or why they were selected. He wasn’t around, so he clearly doesn’t know the facts.”

Asked if former Pataki counsel Finnegan had a role in picking the Ruberti firm, McKeon said, “My understanding is that Mike Urbach made these selections on his own.”

Finnegan has been in the news before for hiring relatives:

*In 1995 it was reported that another sister, Sharon Trotti, had been hired by the city’s Environmental Protection Department a month after Finnegan negotiated a major deal that saved the city from having to build an $8 billion water-filtration plant.

*That same year, shortly after Pataki took office, Finnegan’s sister-in-law, Constance Barrella, was named deputy commissioner of the state Environmental Conservation Department.

*In 1997, The Post revealed that Finnegan and his young son, Robbie, had taken a Super Bowl junket worth $7,000 from a millionaire lawyer-lawmaker with major business Interests before the state.

Finnegan repaid part of the cost of the trip after learning The Post planned to publish a story about it.